After Superman III, Cannon Films acquired the film rights to Superman and produced the much-maligned Superman IV: The Quest For Peace. The original cut of that film was over two hours long, and it was decided that the chunks they snipped out of the final cut ould very well fit into another sequel. Not the most auspicious of starts for a film's development, but that's how Superman V was conceived. There was no story written for the film but it would have presumably had something to do with the excised footage from The Quest For Peace, which supposedly saw Supes fighting Nuclear Man 1 (a Frankenstein-esque monstrosity created by Lex Luthor) in an epic battle sequence that reportedly cost $6 million(!) to film. Unfortunately (fortunately?) Cannon never got their chance to piece together their own Frankenstein's Monster of a movie as both Warner Bros. and star Christopher Reeve decided it was time to hang up the cape for a while - permanently in the case of Reeve.
